We tend to forget that Otto Nicolai, best known for his Merry
Wives of Windsor, was not an operatic composer solely in
his own time. In fact, the man who founded the Vienna Philharmonic
Orchestra was principally a church musician, who had begun his
career in the Prussian embassy chapel in Rome. Thence he succeeded
Mendelssohn, no less, as court and cathedral director in Berlin.
This disc addresses this central fact of Nicolai's life by producing
no fewer than five first-ever recordings, adding two items,
previously unrecorded, from his Liturgie No.1. I suspect this
will be a quiet revelation to those who have never heard his
church music not because it is, in itself, earth-shattering
but because it offers a historical corrective to the assumption
that Nicolai was first and foremost a stage animal.

The church choir was rather more often his stage. The 1847 Liturgie
is represented by three out of twelve short movements. The writing
is rich and sonorous but with single voice lines to the fore
as well. The keynote here is amplitude but simplicity. The moving
directness he cultivates results in heightened expression, not
least in the lovely Heilig, heilig, heilig. The brief
gradual motet Herr, ich habe lieb is not much more than
two minutes in length but enough to signal a comprehensive command
of the medium.

Nicolai’s theatricality certainly seeped into his church
music in the same way that, just occasionally, his church music
could seep into his theatrical music. Or perhaps it would be
truer to say that both these qualities were part of his musical
make up, making seepage a questionable concept. His music admitted
contrasts. His setting of Psalm 97 is certainly extrovert, its
polyphonic bases kindled by a fiery, outward looking modernity.
The Offertorium in Assumptione Beatae Mariae Virginis,
Op.38 was the only one of these works to be published in Nicolai’s
lifetime, a curious fact, but one perhaps explained by his very
early death: he was 39 when he died, about the same age as his
predecessor, Mendelssohn.

First and last works combine usefully in this disc. His first
major composition was his setting of Psalm 54 for soloists and
chorus. It’s heard here in its original form, less expansive
than it subsequently became when Nicolai revised it. It’s
very redolent of the influences he must have absorbed in Rome:
Palestrina is the obvious name, and though it is in places very
beautiful it’s not wholly representative of the music
he was to compose over a decade later. His last composition
was his 1848 setting of Psalm 31, a grave, romantic work that
pursues archaic polyphony in its slow-moving and sustained length.

The music, which has been excellently recorded, is sung with
great skill, excellent intonation, and clarity by the choir
and directed with notable sensitivity by Frieder Bernius. It
all makes for an invaluable revaluation of Nicolai’s place
in German choral music.

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